Posted tagged ‘NYPL’

Just a couple links today that I feel the need to share, one good two bad.

Let’s start with the bad. First up, the Mayor of Concord, New Hampshire (the capital of my home state) has announced that he is considering closing the library completely to help close the city’s budget gap. Nothing final yet, but there’s something really sad about the prospect of a library-less capital.

Second, in news that isn’t much better the NYPL is looking at a potential 17% budget cut, which would necessitate a loss of 465 jobs and a reduction of hours to an average of 41/week in each location. To put that in a little perspective, my library is open 63 hours a week, the minium mandated by the state for a library serving a community the size of Pittsfield. NYC is just a little bit larger than us.

I know I’ve kind of beaten this issue to death here, but the OCLC record use policy is still scheduled to go into effect next month, and it’s still a travesty. Furthermore, I think it’s still unclear to many just why they ought to be outraged by this.

Fortunately, Tim Spalding has once again come forward to explain just that. In a new post at Thingology he goes through the legalese in the policy in a brilliantly readable way. After reading this there’s no way that an OCLC member library could be anything less than horrified.

And if you want to speak up, then there’s actually going to be a forum now. This Friday Karen Calhoun of OCLC will be participating in an open forum at the NYPL. So if you can get to New York (sadly I can’t, as I will be participating in this instead).

The Library of Congress has just released their report on the pilot program in which they uploaded a couple thousand photos from their archive onto Flickr. By all accounts the project has been declared a huge success. According to the report “the photos have drawn more than 10 million views, 7,166 comments and more than 67,000 tags”. These are simply astonishing numbers!

And now the NYPL is following suit. I’m incredibly jealous, coming from a library with a large photo archive that we will likely never get around to indexing fully. These project are a great way to both fill in metadata, and to ensure these materials are discovered and utilized, and I’m hoping the results of the LoC’s project will inspire others to do the same.